Tom Pepinsky

Category: Asia

  • I Want a World-Class University NOW

    When you look through the newspaper here, the most striking thing is how many ads you see for education-related things. "Tuition" services to help you kid pass his A-levels. "Twinning" programs to get you an Australian or British degree from the comfort of Singapore. And then there's the news items about how X local college has a new partnership with Y international university to develop a truly unique, world-class university environment right here in Singapore. Singapore University of Technology and Design + MIT = Profit!

    The university bit is the most contentious. Singapore is a rich and highly developed country but it does not yet have a university system that includes a Harvard, an Oxbridge, a Heidelberg, a Sorbonne, a Bologna, or a Tokyo. The best Singaporean students get government scholarships to go overseas to somewhere in the US or the UK. But Singapore wants to change that and it is not content to wait: the government wants to create world-class universities right here, and right now. I heard a rumor that one local university has an explicit institutional mission to become "like Harvard or Chicago" within the next decade.

    I'm skeptical that doing so is possible. I don't think that great universities can be established by administrative fiat–or more precisely, they probably can be, but it takes hundreds of years for them to become great. But OK, let's say you're Singapore and you don't like to be told that something isn't possible. You want to make great universities in a really short amount of time. How do you do it? It seems to me that there are a couple strategies.

    1. Salaries. Offer sky-high salaries to attract top-notch scholars.
    2. Tenure. Make tenure standards really strict so that you encourage greatness from your productive junior faculty and kick out anyone who doesn't pass the bar. You're left with the cream of the crop.
    3. Support. Create the type of environment that makes research easy. This is the KAUST strategy.

    In various ways, the government here is trying all three. But they are destined to fail. (The tenure idea is particularly idiotic: if someone can get tenure at Chicago, that person will work at Chicago, not at some local uni.) I think about myself as an example. I'm not a top notch scholar and I would never get tenure at a very top institution, but I'm the type of person that they should want because I do work on a timely topic that is relevant to local interests, and despite whatever quirks I seem to fit in very well with the mainstream of my discipline. But I just don't know if there's anything that you could do to make me want to move to, say, the National University of Singapore, the flagship place here. Let's say that they offered me 10-times my current yearly salary, unlimited research support, and the promise that I could direct the political science department in however I saw fit (overseeing new hires, graduate training, undergraduate curriculum, etc.). That still wouldn't attract me here permanently, and I like Singapore.

    What happens is that Singaporean universities are getting pretty good at landing late-career academics who already have raised their families, made their signature contributions, and established themselves in their fields. (An example.) These folks are attracted to Singapore because they get a great salary, a comfortable lifestyle, and the freedom to do whatever they want, taking on as few students as they like and publishing as little as they like and in whatever venues they see fit. Maybe they're also from somewhere around here and it's convenient to get home. But that's not a recipe of institution-building, that's a recipe for creating little intellectual islands within a loose institutional structure.

    I know that this sounds dopey, but what you need to do to make a great university is to find a collection of people who are committed to living in a particular place and who have a shared vision about scholarship. Seriously. They have to want to work at that university for its own sake, regardless of location, salary, support, etc. (That, for example, is how you can sustain globally competitive research universities in Ithaca and Rochester, NY. It's not because of location/salary/weather/support.) It's how Heidelberg, Bologna, Oxford, Harvard, and other such institutions got started. And of course it takes time. Cash, high standards, and flush research accounts will get you a couple top scholars, but even they will only get you so far.

  • Not Going to Bangkok

    A good friend of mine is currently in Bangkok doing some exploratory field research (he studies how politicians mobilize the poor). There was a point a couple months ago when we considered whether or not it would be possible for us to meet up while I was here, with me flying up there to see him. Needless to say, we’ve decided that that’s not a good idea. Too bad, because I’ve never been to Bangkok before, but visiting there right now is really flirting with disaster.

    From time to time I get asked what the conflict in Thailand is all about. That’s one of those questions that seems like it has a simple answer, but if you really start digging you realize how hard it is to boil it down to something simple. The proximate issue is the legacy of former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, who was extremely popular among poor and rural citizens but who alienated the middle- and upper-class establishments, in particular in Bangkok. Thaksin was also widely accused of being corrupt (he is fantastically rich), and of being too violent in his campaigns against drug dealers and other enemies of Thai society (he was once a policeman). Thaksin was ousted by a coup in 2006; when the military allowed new elections, a candidate widely considered to be a Thaksin proxy won. Anti-Thaksin groups (“yellow shirts”) eventually mobilized big demonstrations that led to that new government’s ouster, with the help of some of their allies in the courts. The current PM, Abhisit Vejjajiva, represents the yellow shirt faction. Now, pro-Thaksin groups (“red shirts”) who believe the current political order to be illegitimate, are trying to bring the current government down. At the moment, it appears that they have failed…but no one thinks that this is over.

    Red Shirt Rally (source: Straits Times)

    5-20-10

     

    It’s tempting to say, then, that this all starts with Thaksin, that it’s a debate about his legacy. But it goes at least two levels deeper. The first level is about money and representation in Thai politics. The establishment in Thailand since, well, the 1600s or so has had a heavy bias towards comparatively well-to-do urban constituencies. Poor, rural Thais, especially those in the northeast, have always felt marginalized. Thaksin was the first national politician whose policies really targeted those marginalized Thais, and that made him genuinely popular. And because politics is a zero-sum game, strengthening this marginalized group means threatening the urban middle-class establishment. I have no doubt that if Thaksin were allowed to return to Thailand and to compete in another election, he would win handily.

    The second level, though, is about what democratic theorists call “loyal opposition.” Stable, consolidated democracies have what are known as loyal oppositions–factions that lose election but who don’t then overthrow the system in response to having lost. They are the opposition, but they are loyal to the principles of political competition. Thailand has never developed a system whereby the losing side (whoever it is) respects the outcome as legitimate. That means that someone always believes that the system is illegitimate, and will take to the streets to push for revolutionary change. I suspect that the main reason why a norm of loyal opposition never developed is because the Thai king has for too long intervened in Thai politics to solve intractable problems by fiat rather than forcing Thai politicians to come to acceptable agreements on their own. Oh, and the fact that the Thai military keeps launching coups (after Bolivia, no country has had more) doesn’t help either. Instead of working to come to acceptable agreements, both sides look to the king, the military, or both, to solve their problems for them.

    Combine the absence of a norm of loyal opposition with severe imbalances in representation, an old king who is too willing to step into politics, a coup-happy military, and a popular (if flawed) former leader, and you have the recipe for a never-ending war of attrition between two camps that sincerely believe that their opponents have no right to participate in any kind of legitimate government. This gets worse before it gets better.